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Theatre Choice

Writers from James Joyce to Philip Chevron have drawn on Edwardian Dublin, a cockpit of abject poverty, wild notions of Celtic reawakening and festering resistance to British imperialism, and Corn Exchange’s new production treats this already familiar terrain in a new and fitfully successful manner, adapting the Faust myth to the Dublin of 1904 and following a Yeatsian dreamer as he leads his company to a calamitous first night of a play-within-a-play, The Wooing of Emer. The uneasy combination of Commedia dell’Arte and narrative theatre make for a production that is filled with japes and mugging but lacks coherence. Although the atmosphere provided by Conor Linehan’s live piano-playing pulls it together somewhat, and a nuanced performance from Mark O’Halloran (above right) as the Yeats-like William Hayes shows what can be done with the hybrid style, the joke is too weak to be sustained over 90 minutes.